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Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.

Aleecia M. McDonald's research focuses on the public policy issues of Internet privacy, and includes user expectations for Do Not Track, behavioral economics and mental models of privacy, and the efficacy of industry self regulation. She co-chaired, and remains active in, the WC3’s Tracking Protection Working Group, an ongoing effort to establish international standards for a Do Not Track mechanism that users can enable to request enhanced privacy online. Read more » about Aleecia McDonald

Jennifer Granick is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Jennifer returns to Stanford after working with the internet boutique firm of Zwillgen PLLC. Before that, she was the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Jennifer practices, speaks and writes about computer crime and security, electronic surveillance, consumer privacy, data protection, copyright, trademark and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Read more » about Jennifer Granick

Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum. Read more » about Ryan Calo

Jonathan Mayer is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his J.D. in 2013. He was named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2014, for his work on technology security and privacy. Jonathan's research and commentary frequently appears in national publications, and he has contributed to federal and state law enforcement actions. Read more » about Jonathan Mayer

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Aaron Swartz died this month two years ago. On the evening of January 21, the American Bar Association White Collar Crime Committee is hosting an event about Aaron and his case. I'll be there, as will Brian Knappenberger, Director Of The Internet’s Own Boy, and Elliot Peters, Aaron's lawyer.

In the previous blog, I noted that the logical next step in understanding “privacy as fairness” was to examine if it is possible to identify principles that would effectively guide regulation based on "privacy as fairness." In this blog post, I observe that debate about regulations based on "privacy as fairness" should be oriented by three considerations: 1) regulations should be linked back to legitimate concerns about human emotional and physical well-being, not just abstract concepts such as "autonomy"; 2) regulations should enjoy a broad consensus as to both the harm to be addressed and the effectiveness of the proposed rule, and 3) “privacy as fairness” should not be confused with the protection of privacy as “solitude.” In this light, I note favorably regulations that are demonstrably necessary to ensure access to economic opportunity, while suggesting caution when considering official legal intervention aimed at balancing power among economic actors. Read more » about “Tool Without A Handle”: Privacy and Regulation – An Expanded Rationale

Good news for journalists wanting added protection from surveillance. Yahoo! hasannounced a technical preview of its email security tool End-to-End, which it has been developing in collaboration with Google. This is another milestone in the tech companies' efforts to protect users not just from outsiders, but also from the companies themselves.

In 2013, 29-year-old Ian Barber allegedly posted nude photos of his ex-girlfriend on Twitter and sent them to her employer and sister. New York prosecutors charged him with aggravated harassment, but the charges were soon thrown out. It was not because evidence pointed to someone else as responsible for the disclosure of the woman’s nude photos. Rather it was because Barber did not send the photos directly to the victim, as New York’s aggravated harassment law requires. Read more » about Expand harassment laws to protect victims of online abuse

A couple of months after the conviction of Ross Ulbricht, the “Dread Pirate Roberts” behind the creation of the Silk Road online drug market, another online drug market, “Evolution” has imploded. Like the Silk Road, Evolution used “Tor Hidden Services,” to hide the true location of their Web site, providing the owners, and drug buyers and sellers with some degree of anonymity. But this Web site didn’t go down thanks to the feds. It went down because its owners took it down.

When Shaheen Shariff asked a group of under-18-year-olds whether a teenage girl has the right to object to her boyfriend sharing a nude photo of her with his friends without her consent, she was shocked by the responses. Read more » about #blurred_boundaries

Shaheen Shariff, an associate professor at McGill University whose research focuses on legal issues related to cyber bullying, said the FHRITP phenomenon is part of a pattern of escalating misogyny on the Internet, in schools and in the public domain generally.

"“Where someone goes can reveal a great deal about how he chooses to live his life," Catherine Crump, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Ars. "Do they park regularly outside the Lighthouse Mosque during times of worship? They’re probably Muslim. Can a car be found outside Beer Revolution a great number of times? May be a craft beer enthusiast—although possibly with a drinking problem.""Read more » about We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans from the cops